Why Do Citizens Matter? Types of Attitudes and Consequences for Models of Administration and Democratic Vitality

This article presents an analytic framework for the study of citizens’ attitudes toward public administration, that allows to understand them in connection with the main proposals of the bureaucratic model and more contemporary models of administration. The paper tries to overcome different methodological problems present in some of the works that have traditionally studied citizens’ attitudes toward public administration (political culture, democratic governance and microperformance studies). The framework suggests that the majoritarian type of citizens’ attitudes in a society toward its public administration affect the form that governmental institutions may take. The prevalent kind of attitudes may facilitate or hinder the implementation of different models, such as, for example, more managerial or more democratic administrative model.

Moreover, a typology of citizens according its dominant attitudes toward governmental institutions is proposed. It distinguishes among bureauphile, bureautolerant and bureautic citizens. The argument behind this typology, which is not completely new, is that the relative weight of one or another type of citizens will have consequences for the operation of public administrations and the vitality of the democracy. As an empirical illustration of the argument, the results of a research on citizens’ attitudes toward the public administration in Spain are presented. However, the main goal of this paper is not so much to present results for the Spanish case, treated with more detail in other author’s publications, as to propose an useful analytical framework for application to other countries. The Spanish case shows that the attitudes of the Spaniards toward the public administration should be analyzed and interpreted in the light of more general patterns of the political culture and the changes that have taken place in the institutions as well as policies sectors in the last years. The results of this analysis show also a complex and differentiated profile of citizens’ perceptions that capture an interesting reflection on the different administration models.